Twitter, the micro-blogging sensation, is rolling out a new, media-rich format to the public soon. The format will include side-by-side panels, where videos and pictures will be integrated into a panel next to the usual live feed. They’ve added endless scrolling, shortcut buttons and suggested people to follow. They’ve also added recommendations based on hash tags, which is intended to make Twitter feeds themselves easier to put into context.

Intellectually, Twitter trends might be easier to digest for the casual user because of the new interface. Unless you’re a voracious social-mediaphile, it’s often overwhelming to try to make sense of the fast-paced public dialogue that happens in 140 characters or less. The new Twitter is designed to make sense out of some of the noise. 

On the other hand, Twitter’s beauty is in its simplicity: the site is ad-free, it works on my barely-functioning iPhone, and it’s lends itself to all kinds of platforms. It integrates well.

Twitter’s simplicity is its most wonderful value, not as a promotion platform, not as a status-updater, but as a public dialogue machine. For every entirely un-fascinating and predictable “I hate Mondays” Tweet, there are also bite sized pieces of insight being produced and released at break neck speed. While entire ideas are never hashed out, they’re produced and digested at such a fast pace that just the act of being on the site allows you to cull information and feed your creativity. Social media makes us smarter because it allows users to change thought patterns so quickly. It allows users to effortlessly amass ideas. 

Now back to the matter at hand —as far as Twitter’s interface goes, I’m not enough of a Luddite to have a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to technology. Staying static is a quick road to irrelevance in the digital world. If Twitter unleashes a mess of a website, they’ll either be savvy and quick enough to fix it, or the super obsessed will suffer the consequences while everyone else quietly logs into Facebook and writes a 141 character post explaining what’s on their minds. There are a million other possibilities from a million other tech companies as to what might happen if Twitter dies, and to me, all of them are exciting.

SEO is a constantly evolving process. As internet marketers, our goal is to deliver quantifiable results using a series of different analytic tools. And yet, any kind of work-rhythm remains completely elusive — we find a decent way of track what we're doing and two months later the site has moved, changed or disappeared forever. Google Analytics is amazing, slick, and heaven-sent, but it isn't a complete, self-contained SEO tool. Constant research is required. SEO marketers have to be agile, savvy, and willing to abandon outdated methods.

Internet marketers need to understand how sites are promoted, where links are coming from, and what we can do to improve in-bound links. It's a simple enough question: How does traffic get to the site we're promoting? Here's where it gets dicey: backlink tracking sites are the worst offenders when it comes to ease of use. They tend to be clunky, they give mixed results, and they disappear all of the time. So, with the intention of cutting through the chaos, here’s my take on some of the most popular backlink sites.

BacklinkWatch.com – http://www.backlinkwatch.com/